Land doesn't vote, right?
What about the natural colors of the land, though? To some degree, they are related to how your block, neighborhood and city you live in votes. Can we reveal with pattern with imagery?
It turns out you can! We processed 2016/2017 data from the National Agricultural Imagery Program and indexed it with election results from the 2016 presidential election. The end result of this processing was a searchable set of image tiles, each half a kilometer across, that covered nearly every square meter of the continental United States.
The margin of victory, ranging from heavily democratic to heavily republican, was binned into 20 discrete classes. For every margin bin, we created an index of the number of times each unique color appeared. Finally, for every bin, we kept the 100,000 most frequently occuring colors and sorted them by luminance.
The figure at the top is the visualization that results from this processing over the entire continental United States, revealing the true natural colors of America's political spectrum.
We also did this processing for individual states, as well as with the 2016 National Land Cover Database. Check out the piece for all the goodies!